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%E2%80%9CMy+mom+has+really+severe+asthma%2C+so+she+ended+up%E2%80%A6+calling+the+doctor+and+get+some+pretty+serious+prescriptions+and+a+new+inhaler+%5Bdue+to+the+smoke%5D%2C+Ms.+Banta+said.

Alec Willard-Herr

“My mom has really severe asthma, so she ended up… calling the doctor and get some pretty serious prescriptions and a new inhaler [due to the smoke],” Ms. Banta said.

Ms. Banta

While the first week of school certainly wasn’t perfect for many, it was especially hectic for Director of Community Ms. Liz Banta.

“The first day of school I was Zooming from my car [while] charging my phone for my hotspot,” Ms. Banta said. “Family [was] coming and going, so it was a stressful week — and all the smoke on top of it.”

Ms. Banta’s in-laws live on her street, so her sister-in-law, brother-in-law, and nieces were split between the two houses to maximize space for everyone. Still, Ms. Banta said that the houses were full. “It was crazy,” she said.

Ms. Banta said that since all of her family lives so close together, “if we all had to evacuate, we didn’t know what we [were] going to do,” she said.

However, it did not come to that. Ms. Banta did not need to evacuate, despite preparing to do so when hearing about the fires.

“I know that if our friends evacuated that we would be probably a day or two behind,” she said. So she and her husband constructed a list of everything that they would need in case they were advised to leave their home, despite never physically packing anything up.

“It’s really weird,” Ms. Banta said. “Just trying to think of things like Christmas ornaments that my kids have made, or, you know, like my grandparents’ wedding photo… things like that, where it would be irreplaceable. It was just a really unsettling feeling.”

Ms. Banta’s family was also housing a horse and three goats for her neighbor’s children, who had also evacuated. The animals stayed in her backyard. (Photo courtesy of Ms. Banta)

Meanwhile, inside the house was completely dark. The power had been out for over a week.

Ms. Banta’s daughter was starting online school, and since the family didn’t have power, they went to sleep earlier than usual. “We ended up just laying in bed with flashlights, reading to our kids,” Ms. Banta said. “In the middle of the night, I would check my phone and then I would have more and more friends and family that had evacuated, so it just was kind of stressful.”

Ms. Bantas’ teaching schedule this semester is focused on one class period, while the rest of her work is surrounding building community at La Salle. This gave her a more flexible schedule, but she said that not having power and taking Zoom calls from her car was “stressful.”

Eventually, Ms. Banta and her family got a generator to charge their devices, but they were still using the cellular hotspot on their phones for the internet for four days.
“It definitely would have been tight quarters if we would have had to take in more people,” Ms. Banta said. “[But] I can’t imagine people that actually lost their homes or had to pack up and take things.”

Although she didn’t have to evacuate her home, Ms. Banta experienced feelings of sadness during and after the chaos of the fires.

“I was really excited for the school year,” she said. “[But] this week it’s sinking in… [that] there’s only so much we can do digitally to build that community, and so it’s just been hard.”

Despite the challenges, Ms. Banta said that she still feels that she is “really lucky” to be in the La Salle community. “I feel like my students have been very positive and optimistic, but it’s just [that] I don’t know,” Ms. Banta said. “Maybe they’re not, maybe they’re portraying a different feeling than what they’re actually feeling.”

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